Edge of Sanity [Review]
Do you have what it takes to survive Lovecraftian horrors in the Alaskan wilderness?
Edge of Sanity is a sidescrolling psychological survival horror game from Vixa Games, published by Daedelic Entertainment. It’s a punishing experience that’s novel at first but quickly becomes repetitive.
You work in the resupply team for a field lab in Alaska for the faceless PRISM corporation. You find the outpost in shambles amid signs of violence, with no people, and soon meet some of the horrifying creatures responsible. Your team scatters as you barely escape. After setting up a barebones camp, it’s time to search for survivors, investigate, and plot an escape. I thought it’s especially cool that all of this takes place during the Cold War.
Action in Edge of Sanity is divided into days. Each day, you can explore one area to scavenge for supplies or look for survivors. Once you have survivors in your camp, you have to ensure they have food and water to stay healthy and in good spirits. Thankfully, they can help you with this by going on scouting missions, upgrading facilities in the camp, and operating camp stations that produce food, water, and essential materials. Each survivor is a character with his or her own personality and motivations. Unfortunately, you can’t save everyone; you can miss characters on any given playthrough. You’re going to have to make some tough choices.
The game’s action takes place in a sidescrolling 2D plane. You can run, jump, climb, and use items, including throwables or weapons. Your inventory size and equipment slots are limited, but they slowly increase when you reach milestones in the game. It’s tough to balance critical items you need for survival with leaving enough spaces open for supplies you’ll find.
Your character is fragile. As you explore labs, forests, mines, and more, you’ll face untold horrors far more powerful than you that want nothing more than to murder you. While you can fight directly, it’s ill-advised. You’re far better off sneaking and hiding in dark nooks or setting off traps. You can take out some creatures with a well-aimed throw of a rock or exploit specific weaknesses like light sensitivity. Facing them is genuinely scary, and it’s made worse by your madness meter creeping up whenever you’re near them.
You must safeguard your sanity in Edge of Sanity, as the title implies. If you let your madness meter fill up completely, you’ll gain a new trait that can either be useful or detrimental. I tried to keep my character as sane as possible because I didn’t want to take the risk. There are items and locations that you can use to bring down your madness.
The game’s graphics are striking. The game opts for stylization over realism, with vibrantly colored art that looks hand-drawn with heavy black ink outlines and details. The creature designs are gruesome, and the effects of your madness (or are they?) on the environment are gross and trippy with eyeballs and more. I liked the otherworldly flora and its hellish encroachment on the environment.
Once you get through the beginning of the game, things get grindy. It becomes a cycle of just entering levels to find supplies and managing your camp over and over. Levels you explore don’t have much variety, and there aren’t many types of enemies. The story reveals don’t justify the repetitiveness for me.
I may have enjoyed the game more if it didn’t rely on a cycle focused on camp management and was more of a straightforward survival exploration. If the camp management aspects are appealing to you, you might have a better time. It reminded me of the board game Dead of Winter, where survivors must battle against zombies rather than the Cthulu mythos-inspired monsters of Edge of Sanity. That board game is more fun because you must cooperate with or betray other players, a far more enjoyable experience than the tedium that settles into the cycle of Edge of Sanity.
Edge of Sanity is available now on PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox One / Series X|S.
Overall Score: 6/10
Played on: PS5
